We live in a world where CGI in movies has gotten so good that it can be difficult to tell what was done practically and what was done in a computer for any given seen. While Tom Cruise may ride motorcycles off cliffs, there’s no need for him to actually do that for it to look like he’s doing that. In fact, CGI is so pervasive that it often appears in shots where you’d never expect it, like a shot of Daniel Craig holding a gun in a James Bond film.
There’s a long standing rumor that has been around for nearly a decade that there’s a scene in Skyfall in which Daniel Craig had to have his hands digitally altered to remove a set of gloves that he had been wearing because it didn’t make sense for the character to have them, since Bond’s gun required his fingerprint to function. YouTube channel Corridor Crew recently reviewed the issue and one of the show’s artists, Wren, explained the situation like this…
To clarify, what the whole thing is, there is this rumor that went around that Daniel Craig had these gloves that he really liked and he bought them on his day off. He convinced the director that he wanted to wear them in the scene, the director was like, ‘Yeah, sure, whatever.’ They filmed the whole scene and then realized, ‘Wait…’ But you're using a glove, so therefore by your own logic in the movie he shouldn't be able to use that gun. But he uses it.
The recent YouTube video has VFX artists reviewing scenes from films to react to both the best and worst of CGI work. What makes their video most interesting is that it’s suggested that we’ve been looking at the wrong scene from Skyfall the whole time.
It had previously been suggested the offending scene comes from a fist fight sequence when Bond is at a casino in Macau, but here the team thinks the scene in question comes a few minutes earlier in the film when Bond is quietly moving through an empty glass office building, and holding his gun the whole time.
The reason they think this is actually the scene in question is because it includes a pretty blatant continuity error. At the end of the sequence Bond is fighting with a sniper who ends up hanging off the edge of the building, holding on to Bond’s hand, which is wearing a glove that wasn’t there in the previous shots.
This error leads the VFX artist reviewing the scene to admit that there probably is CGI in the shots, though, they admit that the CGI is actually really good, as it’s difficult to tell with the naked eye. Of course, the whole thing is made moot by the frustrating continuity error that largely ruins the hard work. Wren continued…
This is so dumb, I hate everything about this. It's looking like maybe they did replace place his hands throughout this shot. I take issue with them not going all the way, the end of the sequence, when he grabs the dude's hand and they still have the continuity error! That's what I don't like about this! What's the point of putting in that effort?! That is something they can do as a pickup with any other two random actors, it doesn't have to be your principal actor.
Whether or not the continuity error was caused by CGI or not, the fact that it exists is a bit wild. While the CGI, if there is CGI, would likely have been far more noticeable in the closeup of the hands, as is pointed out here, the shot could have been grabbed as a pick up shot using other actors without much difficulty.
While we still don’t have official confirmation of Daniel Craig’s CGI hands, and possibly never will, the evidence that this was done is stacking up.
